worse, horning around and jeopardizing
decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise."

* * * * *

There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious
farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the
country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could
obtain credit.

But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the
wheat harvest.

* * * * *

The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my
song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed
several of my effusions.

I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of
labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around
me.....

In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power
with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the
very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact
that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant
and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was
continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a
moral.

For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering
frenzy of belief in what I was doing.

* * * * *

The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.

There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard
he was in need of hands for the season.

I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of
Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to
Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the
superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.

Bonton looked me over.

"You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard."

"I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't
mind walking back to town."

Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his
machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of
Osage orange trees.

Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang.
We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small,
oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ...
much lik